Language Myths
Workshop on the political uses of historical languages.
Abstract
Working across scholarly fields, disciplines, and various national and historical contexts, this workshop explores how languages regarded as ‘ancient’ and ‘historical’ gain significance within the ideologies and practices of modern political movements. Whether ‘dead’ or coexisting with ‘living’ languages, they are often linked to ideologically significant pasts, symbolic identities, and authoritative historical works of literature. A key element of the politicization of such languages is the ideological construction of linguistic and historical ‘antiquity’ as a particular kind of politicized temporality. This one-day workshop features nine case studies that investigate how different languages have served ideological or political purposes in the modern era, and address how their ideological dimensions have been scrutinized, overlooked, or forgotten in their respective fields of scholarship. The nine case studies describe the politicization of languages from Sanskrit, Korean and Japanese to Etruscan, Latin, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Nahuatl.
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